S/O Zillow, I have a horrible habit of looking up what people paid for their house

[Anonymous]

I do it sometimes but who cares? It is not hurting anyone, and it's not like you can tell much about their finances from the house price. There are so many other factors - their incomes, investments, other debt or lack of debt, etc.

[Anonymous]

obsession with this site -
http://sdatcert3.resiusa.org/rp_rewrite/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:obsession with this site -
http://sdatcert3.resiusa.org/rp_rewrite/

also love this - http://www.courts.state.md.us/courtrecords.html
although it's a "tad bit" different

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:obsession with this site -
http://sdatcert3.resiusa.org/rp_rewrite/

also love this - http://www.courts.state.md.us/courtrecords.html
although it's a "tad bit" different

I check the parents of all DD's friends before she goes to their house. Have found some crazy things when I would least expect it!

[Anonymous]

I accidentally did this last week - I typed a friend's new address into Google so I could get the zip code for my Christmas cards . I pulled up the first listing that came up, which turned out to be trulia or something similar. Apparently they paid $1.3M for their house. I was a little blown away - that's probably the most expensive house in my circle. I'd never say a word about it, though.

I did once look up a friend's listing on purpose because Arlington's tax records are public. I was trying to buy a similar house in their neighborhood and wondered how much out of my league theirs was. (Answer: about $300K out of my league.) Again, I'd never mention it to them.

[Anonymous]

It's how I know my grad student friends have a 1.4 million dollar house. I Zillow every house we visit.

[Anonymous]

I do this all the time. I also use franklymls.com to track the sales prices AND subsidies on houses in our area, so I can figure out the true cost of the house to the buyer. We just purchased recently, though, so it was something I needed to know. Rather depressing when I find out we could have spent $20K less than we paid if we had just waited a month, but of course then our former house would have sold for less, too, so it likely all equals out in the end.

Land records are public record. If you don't like that, don't buy property.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm even worse. I can never remember the neighbor's names I see infrequently. If a neighborhood party comes up, I go to the County tax records and look up their names.

I do this too! I keep waiting for it to backfire, in case someone's a renter, though.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If it makes you feel better, I do something worse...I check out those sites that list foreclosures to see which of my neighbors are going to lose their house...it's sad

What is a good site for this?